Holy Bodies Research Articles

Lost in Translation? Constructing Ancient Roman Martyrs in Baroque Bavaria

Over the course of the early modern period, parish, monastic, and pilgrimage churches across Catholic Europe and beyond eagerly sought to acquire the relics of ancient Roman martyrs excavated from the Eternal City's catacombs. Between 1648 and 1803, the duchy of Bavaria welcomed nearly 350 of these “holy bodies” to its soil. Rather than presenting the remains as fragments, as was common during the medieval period, local communities forged catacomb saint relics into gleaming skeletons and then worked to write hagiographical narratives that made martyrs’ lives vivid and memorable to a population unfamiliar with their deeds. Closely examining the construction and material presentation of Bavarian catacomb saints as well as the vitae written for them offers a new vantage point from which to consider how the intellectual movement known as the paleo-Christian revival and the scholarship it produced were received, understood, and then used by Catholic Europeans in an everyday religious context. This article demonstrates that local Bavarian craftsmen, artists, relic decorators, priests, and nuns—along with erudite scholars in Rome—were active in bringing the early Christian church to life and participated in the revival as practitioners and creative scholars in their own right.

The Representation of Holiness Between Realism and Devotion in the Polyptych of Montefiore dell’Aso by Carlo Crivelli

The article seeks to draw attention to the saintly bodies depicted by Crivelli in the polyptych for Montefiore dell’Aso, considering them from different points of view. As written in the introduction, the figures painted by Carlo Crivelli are not simple representations of people, but contain deep religious meanings. The second part of the article focuses on the importance of the technical process of gilding used in the Montefiore panels for the definition of the holy figures, and its significance for a more precise dating. In its third part, the paper suggests a new identification for the Franciscan saint painted in half length with St. Anthony of Padua; the final section looks into Crivelli’s mode of representing the holy bodies of St. Francis and, above all, of St. Louis of Toluse, who wears a ring in which the artist left a previously unnoticed inscription.

The Representation of Holiness Between Realism and Devotion in the Polyptych of Montefiore dell’Aso by Carlo Crivelli

The article seeks to draw attention to the saintly bodies depicted by Crivelli in the polyptych for Montefiore dell’Aso, considering them from different points of view. As written in the introduction, the figures painted by Carlo Crivelli are not simple representations of people, but contain deep religious meanings. The second part of the article focuses on the importance of the technical process of gilding used in the Montefiore panels for the definition of the holy figures, and its significance for a more precise dating. In its third part, the paper suggests a new identification for the Franciscan saint painted in half length with St. Anthony of Padua; the final section looks into Crivelli’s mode of representing the holy bodies of St. Francis and, above all, of St. Louis of Toluse, who wears a ring in which the artist left a previously unnoticed inscription.

Corps saints et dévotion aux reliques à Montpellier à la fin du Moyen Age

Holy bodies and devotion to relics in Montpellier at the end of the Middle Ages. The present article proposes preliminary pathways of research about the cult of relics in Montpellier in the XIVth and XVth centuries, a period in which their acquisition was in full swing. In the first section are examined the major relics of the town and their origins, as well as the procedures which led to the acquisition of holy bodies at the end of the Middle Ages. The second section addresses the devotional practices surrounding the relics, and their place in local religious life. Drawing on the study of sources linked to the consulate of the town, the research questions in depth the religious and political stakes linked to the relics, in the context of geographical distancing from the diocese and of a certain independence from the consulate at the beginning of the XIIIth century.

Handling Knowledge: Holy Bodies in the Middle English Mystery Plays

The representations of the midwife Salome and the Apostle Thomas in the N-Town and Chester plays complicate the relationship between two modes of knowledge: “clergie” or male clerical learning, on the one hand, and knowledge derived from sensory experience on the other. The plays expose clerical learning's dependence on and proximity to lay experiential knowledge. In doing so, they resist the dichotomies that structure other accounts of these figures and demonstrate how theological knowledge does not rest exclusively in any one set of hands. Knowledge, instead, is made manifest at the point of contact between clerical learning and physical experience. The drama empowers its nonclerical audience to test and “assay” in the form of dramatic “experiments” the theological knowledge that structures their religious lives, and thus invigorates the audience's investment in that knowledge.

Feeding holy bodies: A study on the social meanings of a vegetarian diet to Seventh-day Adventist church pioneers

Ten years ago National Geographic magazine reported that the Loma Linda Seventh-day Adventist population is one of the communities in the world that lives longer and with a higher quality of life thanks in part to the biological benefits of a vegetarian diet. Along with National Geographic, other media outlets have reported since then that the Adventist religious community considers a plant-based diet a very important factor for a healthy lifestyle. Adventists have been promoting this type of diet worldwide for more than 150 years. This article is an attempt to understand from a social-scientific perspective the origin of the importance they lend to diet and see whether this helps explain why approximately 150 years after the founding of the church, diet remains crucial for Adventists around the world. The conclusion proposed is that Adventists understood the adoption of a plant-based diet as a special divine instruction in order to nourish their new identity as a special people differentiated from the rest of society. This was possible through a desecularisation of diet that placed food in the moral category of the Adventist belief system.Keywords: Seventh-day Adventist Church; vegetarian diet; religion; health; desecularisation; identity

Imperial Aspirations: Relics and Reliquaries of the Byzantine Periphery

Reliquaries of the Byzantine periphery (Armenia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Rus, Serbia, Wallachia, and Moldavia) have received insufficient study but deserve consideration as an innovative group. Reliquaries and shrines from these states took two forms: first, whole bodies - often uncorrupted - of foundational national figures, either ecclesiastical or political, usually placed in front of templon beams in monastery or city churches; second, circulating fragments displayed in complex arrays. The bodies were often safeguarded in fixed institutional settings in the oldest of reliquary forms: the sarcophagus. The fragments, however, were contained in reliquaries of the newer forms suggesting Western and Byzantine trends. Relics allowed the creation of the notion of a sacred state and divinely sanctioned sovereignty - both by establishing a geography of newly created power founded on holy bodies put in “place ” in sacred institutions, as well as accomplishing the power transfer of the imperium into these peripheral ...

‘Almost Every Miracle is Open to Carping’: Doubts, Relics, Reliquaries and Images of Saints in the Long 12th Century

Many of the great surviving monuments from the middle ages, the cathedrals, churches and objects made for them or for private devotion, testify to the importance of Christian faith in medieval culture. Devotion to the saints was a facet of that belief, vividly recorded in the surviving relics, reliquaries and images of saints as well as in hagiographic literature. Yet medieval sources also contain references to doubts about the nature and power of saints and their relics. The overcoming of doubt or incredulity was a widely used trope in hagiography. However, if we take medieval doubts seriously, they should prompt us to consider whether the images and objects created to celebrate particular saints might sometimes have been designed to bolster dubious claims or help to authenticate disputed material within a rich discourse about both individual saints and relics and about the nature of holy bodies more generally.

Consuming the Lama

Tibetan understandings about the bodies of spiritual teachers or lamas challenge the idea of a singular and bounded form. Tibetan Buddhists believe that the presence of the lama does not depend on their skin-encapsulated temporal body, or a singular lifespan. After death, it is not uncommon for a lama to materialize in other appearances or to become incorporated into the bodies of others through devotees’ consumption of their bodily remains. In this article, I discuss how the European ingestion of the holy bodies of Tibetan lamas creates new possibilities for embodied intersubjectivity, and also how this practice repositions bodily substance in cannibal discourse.

Nancy Bradley Warren The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700. Nancy Bradley Warren. University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. ix +339.

<i>Nancy Bradley Warren</i> The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700<i>The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700</i>. Nancy Bradley Warren. University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. ix +339.

On the Edge of Self and Other: Holy Bodies in Late Antiquity

In the two centuries prior to the outbreak of the iconoclastic controversy in the eighth century, anecdotes about icons began to appear in hagiographies. This essay develops a reading of certain of these anecdotes as constituting a form of "picture theory" that teaches the reader how to engage with icons and how to imagine saintly presence. Reading backwards from the iconoclastic controversy in which positions regarding idolatry and the role of material images in Christian theology and ritual were debated openly, I argue that the hagiographical enterprise that preceded iconoclasm developed discursive pictorial strategies for advertising the importance of representation, of imaging, as a means for embracing the saints without idolizing them. Hagiographical anecdotes about icons in effect sidestepped an idolatrous impulse at the same time as they anticipated the later positive theorization of material expressions of religion.

Consecrated garments and spaces in the cherubim and seraphim church diaspora

ABSTRACTThe Cherubim and Seraphim Church, an African independent church founded in 1925 in Lagos, Nigeria, is best-known for its members' white garments, fashioned to resemble the angelic beings, the cherubim and seraphim, of the Bible. With the movement of church members to different parts of the globe, these garments have become increasingly important to some as spiritual ties with the Nigerian homeland. Similarly, these homeland connections may be established and maintained by the founding of churches in the United States and Canada, which serve as satellite churches for established C&S churches in Nigeria, sharing identical names, related personnel, and similar altar decoration. This paper considers that ways that C&S Church art and dress overcome distance through the connections made by holy bodies, and consecrated garments and spaces.

Practicing between earth and heaven: women healers in seventeenth-century Bologna

In the highly stratified medical system of seventeenth-century Bologna, women healers occupied a low-rank position. Officially women could practice medicine only as midwives or as holders of permits for the sale of patent medicines. Women were a relatively marginal group even within unauthorized medical practice. Of the criminal proceedings against unlicensed healers only 12% were directed against women. In contrast, women were prominent in religious healing--as shown by the record of healing miracles attributed to female saints, and the importance of female convents as centers of supernatural healing. The different status of women in each case might be related to the different role of the body in lay and religious medical practices. While contact with the <<holy bodies>> of the saints was absolutely central in religious healing, <<healing with the body>> was considered a mark of inferiority in lay medical practice.

La confrérie des Corps-Saints de Saint-Sernin de Toulouse au XVe siècle

The Confraternity of the Holy Bodies of Saint-Sernin of Toulouse in the Fifteenth Century. The Confraternity of the Holy Bodies appeared and thrived within the Saint-Sernin church, imposing "saintly tabernacle". This community is attested at the end of the fourteenth century but its origins remain somewhat obscure. A financial analysis undertaken on the basis of one of its account books allows one to for the second half of the fifteenth century, the way it functioned and its budgetary priorities, primarily the preservation and the enhancement of relics.

Une grande confrérie urbaine

A Great Urban Confraternity. According to its constitution and the way it functioned, the Table of the Holy Bodies was a traditional parish confraternity. Nonetheless, its role as guardian of the holy relics of the city and as principal organizer of the Pentecost festival, the recruitment of its members beyond the parochial framework and their high social origins, the important place of its leaders within the Capitoulat and the close relationship that it maintained with the chapter and the abbey of Saint-Sernin, particularly in sharing the responsability of the vestry, made it a powerful association that belonged to the family of the Great Urban Confraternities.

The "Exodus of holy bodies" reconsidered: the Translation of the relics of St. Gildard of Rouen to Soissons

L'article revoque en doute l'opinion acceptee depuis longtemps selon laquelle les raids des Vikings bouleverserent la future Normandie des 841, occasionnant de nombreuses translations de reliques hors du pays par peur des envahisseurs. Une analyse textuelle et codicologique detaillee d'une des sources pour les translations du ixe siecle, a savoir la Translatio Gildardi (BHL 3540), demontre que les reliques du saint furent transferees de Rouen a Soissons dans les annees 840, en meme temps que celles de Romain et de Remi, pour des raisons sans aucun rapport avec les Vikings. Il est ici prouve que la Translatio Gildardi est une source qui fait foi quant a l'evenement, et la paternite en est attribuee a Odilon de Saint-Medard, auteur de la Translation de Sebastien et de Gregoire (BHL 7545); il ecrivait dans la derniere partie du xe siecle. En outre, il est montre que la translation d'Ouen et de ses compagnons, egalement datee traditionnellement de 841, ne peut avoir eu lieu avant 876 pour des raisons qui rest...

The Cult of Relics in the Letters and ‘Dialogues’ of Pope Gregory the Great: A Lexicographical Study

Late antiquity and the early Middle Ages witnessed a change in the Christian attitude toward the remains of the saints. Holy bodies came to be treated less and less as normal corpses, worthy of special veneration but still subject to many of the laws and customs which had regulated the treatment of human remains in pagan Antiquity. They came rather to be viewed as cult objects which could be moved or even divided up according to the demands of religion with little regard for earlier prohibitions of these practices. This change occurred relatively early in the Greek, eastern portion of the Roman Empire. In the mid-fourth century the Caesar Gallus translated a saint's body from one tomb to another, and less than two centuries later Justinian asked Pope Hormisdas for portions of the bodies of the apostles. Despite some outstanding exceptions such as the translations performed by St. Ambrose, the Christians of the West were more conservative in these matters. Nevertheless, by the ninth century at the very latest, western Christians had followed the lead of the eastern church in both translating and dismembering holy bodies.